


i have my freedom but i don't have much time

by getmean



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24180307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: Life settles into a comfortable groove. It takes a few years, takes a whole lot of nightmares and anger and bloodsweatandtears but it settles. Everything does in the end. Sediment to the bottom of a glass. Snafu normally spends his weekends staring at the bottom of one, so he knows better than anybody how things settle. Like a blanket over a corpse, like the smell of blooming honeysuckle over a city.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 13
Kudos: 42





	i have my freedom but i don't have much time

**Author's Note:**

> this is a commission for @incidentalperformances over on tumblr! thank you so much for commissioning me, i seriously really enjoyed writing this for you :~)

After the war, Snafu sinks into a kind of obscurity that can only happen when all the other players on the board go along with it. 

He knows that Burgie knows where he lives. Anyone knows that if they popped up in New Orleans, they’d run into him at some point. He knows that all it takes is a five minute trip down to the VA office, and they’d have his address. But they won’t — turn up, write to him, whatever. Snafu feels the strange truce from all sides every day; a pointed silence that echoes across the whole country. Like when you run into someone you don’t want to, and both of you avert your eyes. 

He likes it. He’s got no other choice but to like it. 

Life settles into a comfortable groove. It takes a few years, takes a whole lot of nightmares and anger and bloodsweatandtears but it settles. Everything does in the end. Sediment to the bottom of a glass. Snafu normally spends his weekends staring at the bottom of one, so he knows better than anybody how things settle. Like a blanket over a corpse, like the smell of blooming honeysuckle over a city. His home is covered in a fine layer of sawdust from the mill, and that’s a kind of settling too. He picked the job up around the same time as he picked his weekend habits up, and if Snafu suspends his disbelief enough he can almost call it balance. Weekdays to work, to hard physical labour which he takes to with a relish that his COs would’ve been amazed at. Weekends to bars, to the pockets of New Orleans carved out by men like him with pocketknives, with stilettos, with the feathery, open kind of need for a place to be what the heart wants.

There’s a kind of freedom in it; a freedom as tenuous as the balance.

Snafu has the same kind of relationship with himself as the guys from his past have with him. Burgie, Bill, Jay — Eugene. Corner-of-the-eye acknowledgement. Grudging distance. Silent and faraway comfort. He feels constantly winded, constantly exhausted from keeping the war-shade of himself away. In the small hours of the morning, snuffling breath of a near-stranger against his throat, the war-shade comes to him, and Snafu is helpless to do anything but see him. 

There’s a drawer in his apartment locked tight, the key slipped into the back of a cutlery drawer and deliberately forgotten about. Snafu knows the contents by heart even if he hasn’t set eyes on them in ten years. Dog tags, an undeserved medal in its velvet-lined box, two thick bundles of paper; letters, and photographs. Snafu’s young, thin face scowling up through time. The eagle, globe and anchor pin rattling amongst it all. They’ll probably exhume it and bury him with it all when his time comes, whoever is around to see it. 

“You’re awake?” the owner of the breath against his neck asks, shifting sleepily in the bed. Hot palm against Snafu’s lower stomach, a kiss behind his ear. “C’mere.”

Snafu rips his eyes away from the ceiling, rolls into the body pressed up against him, and settles down into distraction.

————

In the early days after the war, Snafu saw Eugene everywhere. In the corner store, amongst the crowd of heads in a bar, sat on a bench in Lafayette Square. Smoking a cigarette, laughing, eating lunch with a woman. It became so frequent that Snafu used to lie awake and wonder what he had done to deserve this haunting. As if the nightmares weren’t enough, as if the cold sweats, and the paranoia, and the loneliness weren’t. Now Snafu couldn’t go buy smokes and a carton of milk without running into some redheaded man who’d throw his whole day off. Who knew New Orleans had such a large redheaded population? It was like they were all transplanted there to get to him. 

It means that when Snafu spots a familiar head amongst the gaggle of people in the street, he doesn’t look twice.A decade of training has gone into this deliberate not-looking; Snafu considers himself a quiet master of it by now. Instead, he steps down off the sidewalk, head ducked over a cigarette and the ailing zippo he’s fighting a flame from to light it. Glances up the street to check he can cross, and then he’s stayed by a hand on his shoulder.

“Snafu?” 

The first thought is: _do you really have to ask?_ He’d know Eugene’s face in darkness, by the fleeting light of a star shell, covered in muck and grime and god-knows-what. He’d known it was Eugene before he spoke, before Snafu even turned around. Shouldn’t he know Snafu the same?

The crowd moves around them like water, him and Eugene stood there in the street like statues right in the middle of it all. Snafu keeps trying to find the breath to push the words in his throat out, but he can’t. His cigarette hangs unlit from his mouth, and he snatches at it, draws it away from his lips as his eyes rove over Eugene’s face. He can’t help it. It’s for every stranger in the street he’d thought was Eugene. Every sweet redhead he’s ever slept with. Just to be able to have a memory to hold up against those people: to have something concrete to be able to dismiss their Eugene-ness. No one else could have that boyish cowlick at the front of their head. The freckle under his eye. The weary lines around his mouth, that only deepen the longer Snafu stares.

Then, finally. Breath. “Eugene.” A beat of silence, broken only by the sounds of the street around them. The day is hot and humid; soupy, syrupy. Snafu can feel his upper lip sweating. “What are you doing here?” he manages, and feels his heart start to palpate in his chest as Eugene’s eyes curve warmly.

“Here for work,” he says, and then his eyes dart. From Snafu’s face, to his hand, and back. “I didn’t know you still lived here.”

_Liar_ , Snafu thinks. A gold band catches the light as Eugene’s hand comes up to smooth self-consciously over that cowlick. “Where else would I be?” he asks, and it comes out challenging. Eugene’s brows edge up, and Snafu glances away. This isn’t how he thought it’d go. Hell, it’s been so long he can’t remember how he thought it’d go.

Eugene waits a beat, and then sighs, rolls his eyes. There’s a shadow of amusement in his voice when he speaks. “Snaf, you really haven’t changed at all, have you?” he says, and it hurts, if only because of how true it is.

Snafu grimaces, and thinks about replying, but then — Eugene smiles at him, and the street may as well have emptied spontaneously in that very moment, for how Snafu’s world suddenly goes quiet. He could almost sigh from it. His heart settles against his ribcage, wan but curious, pressing closer to get a look. Same smile, even if the lines it makes spring up around Eugene’s eyes are a little deeper. 

Snafu’s mouth is moving before he can even form the sentence in his mind. “Have you eaten?”

———

Snafu leads Eugene to his favourite hole-in-the-wall café; a pokey little room that a friend of his used to live above, tucked away down a side street between a fortune teller and a flower shop. They sit out with their coffees and their sandwiches in the street, chairs wobbly on the cobbles, the sun slanting a warm beam of light into the gloom of the narrow street. Eugene squints against it. 

“Move your chair,” Snafu suggests, his first words since he’d blurted out his invitation. Eugene’s eyes flick to his, and then he readjusts his chair. Snafu smiles to himself, and finally lights the cigarette that Eugene had interrupted. “So you got married,” he says, mumbled around his smoke. Isn’t it always best to get the worst shit out of the way first? Curiously, Eugene frowns at him, and Snafu nods at the ring on his hand, laid flat on the latticework top of the table they’re sat at. Watches as Eugene glances at it like it’s the first time he’s seeing it, and curls his hand into a fist. 

“Yeah,” he mutters, and swallows. Snafu watches his face closely. “I guess I did.”

It hurts, distantly. Like the ache of an old bruise. But had Snafu really expected anything different? The air is heavy with the perfume of the flowers. Snafu feels like he’s wading through it, as he leans forward to tap his cigarette against the side of the ash tray. “How long?” he murmurs, and Eugene nods. 

“A year, almost.” His face says everything his words don’t. 

Heart in his throat, Snafu asks, “Kids?” It feels like the final nail in the coffin. 

Eugene shakes his head. “She wants some, but —” He won’t meet Snafu’s eye, and clears his throat, glances past Snafu to the mouth of the alley. “We’re waitin’ ’til I get a better job.”

“Uh huh.” Snafu nods, and takes a drag off his cigarette. “Yeah, I see.”

“It ain’t like that,” Eugene says, lamely, and Snafu raises his eyebrows. “Really!” Eugene insists, kicking at Snafu’s foot under the table, and just like that, they’re _them_ again. Stupid, barely-more-than-teenage, arguing with each other because it’s either fight or fuck. He sees Eugene’s expression change, and knows that he’s felt it too. The shift, the settling; back into each other, back into old dynamics. During the war they’d been joined at the hip in a way that would’ve been suspicious in any other place. Three long years they’d both managed to slide under the radar. Figures, that they’d slide back together again. 

Snafu grins, breathes in flowers, and watches as Eugene’s eyes linger on his mouth. “I believe you,” he drawls, slouching back in his seat just to give Eugene a little more to look at. Like slipping back into an old pair of shoes. Snafu had forgotten what it felt like, to have his own personality bounce back off Eugene’s. Ten long years. Unprompted, Snafu offers, “I ain’t married.”

“Never guessed you would be,” Eugene says, and ducks his head as he pulls a pack of smokes from his breast pocket. Wordlessly, Snafu offers up his lighter, and Eugene takes it. They settle into silence, Snafu watching every flicker of Eugene’s expression as he smokes and drinks his coffee. He can’t stop looking at him. Can’t stop cataloguing every single way he’s the boy Snafu knew while still being a man he doesn’t recognise. It’s more than the new lines on his face and the way that time has softened him. There’s just something sad to him now that hadn’t been there when he was young. Sad, and resigned. Like someone has their fingers pinched around some small and vital flame inside of him. Snafu wonders how he looks to Eugene, wonders if he looks so different in some small and intangible way. 

“Am I dreamin’?” he asks, and catches the glance Eugene throws him easily. Those deep brown eyes, another one of those things the fake doppelgängers that Snafu sees everywhere can’t recreate. That’s one more. Maybe by the time he and Eugene part ways, he’ll have studied enough to never give another man a glance in the street again. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” Eugene says, and Snafu imagines kissing him. Leaning across the table, grabbing him by the collar of the shirt his wife probably pressed and packed so neatly for him. Snafu wonders if he kisses her like he used to kiss Snafu; tender, all-consuming, hands gripped up so tight in Snafu’s hair he was sure they’d never be able to part.

But he doesn’t. Instead he asks, “How long are you here for?” and keeps his hands to himself. 

“Long weekend,” Eugene says, smoke streaming from his nose as he ashes onto the ground. Then he smiles, wryly, and glances away. “Stayin’ in a real dump.” He pauses, and his eyes slide to Snafu, smile still tugging at his mouth. “Remember the barracks in Peking?”

Snafu takes a drag from his cigarette. “Sure.” Cold, and damp, stained concrete and dozens of racks crammed in close together. Bugs when it was warm. Snow that came in under the door when it wasn’t. Practically deserted at all hours except bedtime as a result, a quirk of the place that he and Eugene used to take great advantage of. Though he’s sure it’s not that which Eugene is prompting him to remember. “Roaches everywhere?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You can stay at mine,” Snafu says, offhand, before his brain can catch up with his mouth. When it does, he blinks at Eugene, who is staring at him like he’s waiting for a punchline that will never come. Snafu swallows. His automatic reaction is to snatch the words back, to make a joke of it, but something in him stays his hand. _Wait_ , a voice says. _He’s not saying no._

He’s not saying anything.

“Guess it wouldn’t be much different from sharing a foxhole, huh?” he says, finally, staring down at his cigarette as he taps his thumb to the filter. Snafu watches him chew the thought over, mouth pulled to the side and eyes distant. He wishes he could know what Eugene is thinking; just what exactly he’s running through his mind as he leaves Snafu to sit there in silence. It’s a familiar feeling. Snafu used to watch Eugene’s sleeping face under the cover of night in Okinawa, and wonder the same. Dirty and bloodied, frowning even in sleep. Snafu always wanted to keep the world from him, but was never particularly good at it.

Eugene speaks, drawing Snafu up from the mire of the past. “Just for the weekend,” he says, that sweet serious set to his mouth that Snafu hadn’t even realised he’d missed so much. Tentatively, something shifts in his chest. Eugene’s brows dip, but if he regrets his words, he doesn’t show it. 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah, I —” Eugene glances away. His hands twist in his lap. “You know I can’t say no to you,” he mutters, voice low. 

_Yeah,_ Snafu thinks. _I know you_. He nods to himself, and settles back in his seat as he takes a drag from his cigarette. “Should’ve let me pass by earlier, huh?” he says, and Eugene doesn’t reply.

———

It’s inevitable, really, the way they fall together. 

The moment the door closes behind them, and the silence that only comes with privacy falls over the room, Snafu knows how this is going to go. He hadn’t had ulterior motives — or at least, he didn’t think any ulterior motives he did have would come to anything. The moment that wedding band had flashed in the afternoon sun, all hopes of rekindling what they used to have had been dashed. But now, with Eugene looking at him with something hopeless and open on his face, Snafu knows a little better. Even something that’s been settled for years can be stirred up to the surface again. All it needs is a little coaxing.

Snafu’s always considered Eugene to be the honest one out of the two of them. Isn’t it strange, what time can do?

“Kiss me,” Eugene says, his bag still over his shoulder and his shoes still on. Lingering on Snafu’s doormat like he hasn’t quite made up his mind to stay just yet. 

Snafu sets his wallet down on the kitchen counter; his smokes, his lighter, follow. He doesn’t turn around. “If I do, I won’t be able to stop.” Eugene’s silent presence in his apartment is a physical ache; Snafu’s whole self seems to yearn across the space between them. 

“What if I didn’t want you to?” Eugene murmurs, his voice soft but resolute. Snafu turns, and slouches against the counter behind him. They exchange a look. Outside, the street is noisy with happy, careless people. 

“Ask me again,” Snafu says, and watches as Eugene’s throat bobs. 

Afterwards, they lie together in a sweaty tangle in Snafu’s bed, sheets kicked to the floor, cigarette smoke trailing up towards the ceiling. Eugene is quiet. Snafu’s head is blissfully, blessedly empty. It doesn’t feel how it usually does; the post-sex stupor. Normally Snafu is up and gritting his teeth in a chilly shower before the other guy can catch his breath back. 

“You fuck just like you used to,” Snafu breathes, and stretches luxuriously, until his back pops. “Nobody’s as good as you.”

“Is this what you’ve been up to, then?” Eugene murmurs, eyes on the cigarette between his fingers. Snafu pillows his head on his arm to look at Eugene, who avoids his eye.

“Sure,” he says. “What, you don’t — ?”

Eugene doesn’t answer, but the way his eyes slide to meet Snafu’s says more than his words could. His pupils are still blown wide and dark, making him look doe-eyed and young in the warm afternoon light that Snafu’s apartment always traps. Snafu gathers himself up onto his knees, upsetting the ash from the tip of his cigarette to scatter onto the sheets.

“Nobody since me?” he asks, and Eugene snorts, and shakes his head

“I’m married, ain’t I?” 

Snafu’s eyes dart. “Well sure, but lotsa guys like us…” he trails off. “You’ve really not had anybody since me?”

“What’s the point?” Eugene asks, flatly, and leans across the bed to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray on Snafu’s side-table. He glances at Snafu, sidelong, vulnerable. “Is it nice?” he adds, and Snafu frowns at him until he extrapolates. “The freedom?”

Snafu snorts. That old tenuous thing. “Comes and goes,” he says, and then slinks closer, plasters himself up against Eugene’s side. It’s hard to stay away now that they’ve come together. His neck throbs with the bites Eugene had treated Snafu to when he was inside him. “Bet it’s nice havin’ someone makin’ you dinner,” he says, dreamily, as Eugene pats his thigh. “Someone to come home to.”

“Not as nice as this,” Eugene murmurs, ducking his head to kiss Snafu, who goes limp at the touch. If he closes his eyes and really concentrates on not thinking, Snafu can almost swap the Louisiana sun for the heat of the Pacific. Can almost imagine that ten years haven’t passed. Can almost pretend that this is something real. 

——

One long weekend of pretending the rest of the world doesn’t exist melts into another one, and then another; Eugene finding more and more outlandish excuses for his frequent trips to New Orleans. 

“She knows you’re cheatin’ on her, and hasn’t said a thing,” Snafu reminds him, whenever Eugene frets. “Hey, maybe she’s gay too?”

Eugene hates to mention her. Whenever she comes up, he gets that pinched, guilty expression on his face that Snafu recognises from that first moment they had ran into each other. “I love her, so much,” he says, but still leaves his wedding ring in the dish with Snafu’s keys when he stays over. Snafu doesn’t feel the guilt that he does, but he does hate seeing it on Eugene’s face. The time they get together is so precious and sparse that it feels a waste when negativity shoulders its way in between them. Some weekends Eugene doesn’t want to do anything that involves his face not being in Snafu’s neck, and sometimes he cuts their time short and goes home with a pissed off Snafu snapping at his heels.

Sometimes Snafu will get to have him for a whole week, the two of them living some strange facsimile of a domestic life together before Eugene has to pack back up to drive back to Mobile. He lives just a five minute drive from his parents’ home, and judging by the way his occasional stories of home always seem to revolve around that house, they still have him firmly under their thumb. 

“Wonder what you parents would make of me,” Snafu says, one bright morning during a week in which he had Eugene all to himself. “Wonder what your girl would think.” He’s at the stove, flipping bacon in the pan. Ever since he and Eugene had fallen into bed together that hazy Saturday afternoon, he’s lost his taste for the nightlife he was so caught up in. Now he likes things he supposes any other thirty-two year old should enjoy; listening to Eugene read to him, cooking him meals. He’s spending more time in his apartment than he has in the six years he’s rented it, and it shows. New furniture keeps cropping up daily. If he didn’t know any better, Snafu would say he’s nesting. “Did you want to marry her?” he adds, curiously.

Eugene, hair wet from the shower they had taken together, shrugs. “Almost,” he mutters. Snafu watches him nudge the tip of his cigarette against the side of the ashtray, absorbed in the act. “Parents were givin’ me such a hard time it was almost a relief.”

Snafu nods. Figures. The influence of old Southern parents is not to be underestimated. Snafu counts his lucky stars daily that he doesn’t have any parents left to tell him what to do. “Is it like you thought it’d be?” he asks, turning back to the pan of food. He can feel Eugene’s eyes on the back of his head, and is reminded suddenly of a similar conversation between the two of them, years ago. Him and Eugene, twenty-one and washed up naked on the beach of Pavuvu, sand gritty between his molars. _Do you wanna get married? Maybe we can just give each other a ring and pretend._

Is Eugene remembering the same? Snafu doesn’t turn to meet his eyes. 

“It’s not like what I imagined,” Eugene says, eventually. Snafu slides the bacon and eggs onto plates, and sets them on the table, doubles back for the coffee pot. Eugene’s bare chest is littered with little pink bites, all around his nipples, the softness of his belly. Absently, he rubs at them, and thanks Snafu as he hands him a cup of coffee.

“How so?”

Eugene lifts one shoulder. “I guess it’s everythin’ people tell you it’s gonna be. Y’know, I get home from work and food’s on the table. We listen to the radio together, we sleep in the same bed. But there’s no joy.” Here, he stops. Cuts his bacon into tiny little pieces as Snafu watches, chewing his own food. Eugene’s mouth is downturned, twisted in that guilty way he gets when he talks about her. “There’s somethin’ missin’.”

Snafu swallows his mouthful, picking at his bacon with his hands as he asks, “Like what?” 

Eugene snorts, and glances up at Snafu, a smile curving his mouth as his eyes flick over Snafu’s face. “You think if I knew I’d be worryin’ about it?” He laughs, wryly, and reaches for his coffee. “How about you, Snaf? Is this,” he gestures to thin air with his free hand,”everythin’ you imagined?” 

It’s a little mean, even if he doesn’t intend it to be. Snafu follows the line of Eugene’s hand, eyes alighting on the new, mismatched furniture. Before, it had been bare; just a mattress, a kitchen table, his fridge empty but for beer and condiments. Just a place to sleep at in between work and the weekends. A place to bring a guy back to, for that short-term burst of distraction and the touch he’s always been so regrettably in need of. 

“It is now,” he says, honestly. “Or at least, most of the time.”

They regard each other across the span of the kitchen table. Snafu eats another bite of bacon. Eugene pillows his cheek on his knuckles, and smiles. There’s something a little sad in it. Eyes curving, pale lashes caught in the slant of morning sunlight that always hits him when he sits there. There’s always something a little sad to Eugene now; Snafu doesn’t know how to wipe it away. Sometimes by the end of a weekend it starts to lift, and there’s pockets in between his coming and going where Snafu forgets about it entirely; where Eugene seems to forget it too. Grinning like he used to, that smile that had gotten Snafu hooked in the first place. Transformative, the way it takes that serious, set expression of his and opens it up. 

“Do you think this could be enough?” Eugene asks. 

Snafu nudges his plate away from him. Somewhere in the span of a minute, he’s lost his appetite. “I don’t know,” he answers, and looks down at his hands, flat on the table. The scars from the mill are pink and shiny against his deep skin. He flexes them. Imagines a tan line on his ring finger like Eugene has. “A little is better than nothing.”

When it’s good, it feels so good that Snafu thinks he could go along like this forever. Getting Eugene for these finite bursts of domesticity and affection and pleasure. They go to the pictures, to bars, out to eat. Walks along the river, whole days spent in bed only interrupted by dashes outside for food, for sunlight on their skin. And Snafu knows himself; knows he’s a person who will endure a lot of bad for a little good. If his whole life can’t be like this, he can settle for pockets of happiness. He knows Eugene feels the same.

Everything comes down to what you’ll settle for, and what you’ll settle against, in the end.

During the weekdays, Snafu moons around like a lovestruck teenager, wondering what Eugene could be up to back in Alabama. All hours of the day. Is he eating? Is he laughing? Is he thinking of Snafu too? The guys at work have started noticing — they tease him, joke around that his girl can’t be putting out enough if he’s walking around with his head all the way up clouds. It makes him feel warm, to know he’s so obviously missing someone that people can see just by looking at him. 

He wonders if Eugene is walking around just as dreamy about him. He wonders if he should feel guilty. He wonders how this whole affair will end. Will it go as he hopes it will? No longer just a secretive weekend fling; Snafu wants to see it bloom and expand to stretch out so endless he can’t see it the edges of it anymore. There’s such a distinct emptiness to his apartment now that Snafu needs to see it filled. Eugene’s spot at the kitchen table. His side of the bed. His end of the sofa. The water glass he likes to drink out of, the mug he’d chipped by dropping it in the sink. All the tangible things to remind Snafu that it happened — that it’s happening — that he’s not down the rabbit hole of some extended war nightmare that he’ll wake gasping and sweating from any minute. 

Eugene had left his journal on Snafu’s bedside table on his last visit. Worn, leather-bound, full of the inside of his head. Snafu takes it for the good sign he wants so badly for it to be.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
